These Goblin Dreams
by wingedraksha
Summary: Six years ago, Sarah Williams went Underground. She never really came out. Sarah/Jareth, oneshot for now.


**A/N: Obviously, I own nothing of the Labyrinth except for a DVD and a lot of love. This is my first Labyrinth fic, so hopefully I did it justice.**

* * *

What she wanted to do was to write. Fill someone's mind, fill someone's page, fill her own page. Her own mind. With other things, new things, things untainted by… by the taint. By _that_, by _them_, by…

Well.

And by _him_.

She wanted to find a place inside her head where words were, where they waited, and where nothing from Beneath had slipped its sly dry fingerlets. That was hard, understand; it wasn't like her mind (her body, still untouched, her mind, never that) was a simple roadmap with neatly marked off sections: Don't Visit, No Entrance. The Underground didn't heed signs, anyway, so it was all- it was all pointless, a moot point, less than a point. Sarah Williams had it in her, and as much as she searched for a part with no memories, she couldn't quite find a clean spot.

The Underground.

Them.

_Him_.

"Goblin King," she whispered, fingers tapping on the notepad, her pen skittering across the margin in a crazy spidering scrawl, her other palm pressed hard into her cheek as her eyes drifted. Across the library table, a young man in her European History 302 class glanced up, eyes flicking from his notes to her mouth to her hands. He was a pretty boy, she had to admit, the kind with dark hair and eyes that made you want to sit them down behind a candle. But he wasn't her type.

That thought made her chuckle, and his eyes lingered on her for another second before dropping to his own work. Sarah felt a twinge of regret, and spent another few moments hating _him_ just a little bit more.

Then she sat forward and scooted her chair back and, gathering her yellow notepad and her stack of books, stood. This wasn't working. This wasn't getting anywhere. This was stupid, in fact, if you got right down to it. She was stupid, thinking she could write. After all these years, thinking that she could dredge up some creative little whirl that had no wash of fey, no pale tint of owls and monsters and glittery mismatched eyes.

All these years. Six years. To be exact. Six years, three months, seventeen days. She'd been fifteen then, naïve fantastic beautiful girl. And maybe she had done a foolish thing. Maybe she had wished a foolish wish, and maybe-just-maybe she had nearly gotten her baby brother killed. Or maybe all that was illusion, fantasy, madness. She had been fifteen then, Sarah Williams, and the Goblin King had tricked her or she had tricked herself and either way he'd almost won more than just Toby, except that no, no, it was entirely possible that none of that ever happened and it was just some excruciatingly vivid dream but _no_.

At twenty-one, a junior at Brown College, the girl with the crazy-long brown hair and those wide gorgeous eyes, Sarah Williams was not actually insane.

Six years ago, the Underground had taken Toby. It had taken Toby, and it had taken her, and she had gotten out, gotten them both out, but sometimes she wasn't sure if that was true at all. (Somehow, it was when she worked the hardest to convince herself that none of it had happened that she was most convinced it had.) After all, she couldn't write anymore. She'd never really kept up the acting, because it was too hard to be someone else when she didn't even have a solid base of who _she_ was anymore, but there had been writing and there had always been that and she _couldn't do it_. Because there was the ghost. The taint. There was _him_, in the back of her head, all these… all these memories or thoughts or dreams. She could feel him in her, beneath her skin, his faded laughter shuddering up _her_ spine. When she slept, sometimes, Sarah woke up screaming. Screaming a name.

Screaming _his_ name.

She didn't remember the dreams. Not once. Maybe they were horrible, the Escher Room all over again only darker this time, with no Toby, just her and him always around the next corner and that damned song playing in her head, and the knowledge that he could tip her off into space any time he wanted. Maybe they were another kind of horrible, the kind she could only acknowledge in the shadows, like the dance. Like the way he'd held her, held that little girl she'd been, promising things she hadn't been able to understand. Promising things she still couldn't understand, even looking back. Lies, maybe. Or truth. Or did it even matter?

Sarah walked fast, her books tucked under one arm, her braid slapping against her back as she jogged up the steps towards her apartment-style suite. Not for the first time, she thanked god (or gods; after all, who knew?) that she no longer shared a room. A bathroom, maybe, but not her own room. Once inside the small quarters, she dumped her books and the notepad and slumped down onto her bed. The quilt that her father had bought her, admittedly on the advice of her step-mother, rumpled around her feet as she kicked off her shoes.

God, it had been a long day. Up at seven for her 8 o'clock, then bike across campus to her 10:30, then study group for one of her Anthro independents, then fifteen minutes for lunch before it was time for her afternoon waitressing shift at one of the school diners, then a little more attempted studying, then a little more attempted writing, and now she was back in her room at 9:58 in the evening and she'd had no dinner.

"My life," Sarah pronounced to the empty air, "sucks." A laugh, imagined, surely, curled its way through the spaces between her vertebrae. "Stop," she said, as if she could control it, as if she could control her own mind, her own skin. And it did stop, but only because she reached back and scratched the spot, banishing the ghost of _his_ laughter with the edges of her fingernails.

She hadn't realized, back when she was fifteen, how easy it was. How open _she_ was. How simple it had been for the Underground, for its clever, proud, sneering King, to sneak through her lashes and the freckles on her young arms until it had infected her completely. She hadn't realized when she ran the Labyrinth, when she'd been so blinded by the sparkling forbidden fantasy of it all, how much her life had really changed. And she had paid for the words that bought back her brother. Oh, yes, she had paid.

Whispers against the back of her neck, like a breath against her flesh, tingling the fine hairs there. Sarah sighed, slapped at it.

"Leave me alone," she told herself, ignoring the part where none of this made sense. "I don't want you here."

_Don't want who?_

Not her voice. Not any kind of a voice, really. Just an idea, a sort of oil slick of words that she touched without meaning to and couldn't quite wash off.

"Goblin King, Goblin King," she murmured in answer, remembering the times she'd dreamed of the others. Those dreams were always clear, always wonderful, and always gone come morning. It was only _he_ who lingered, blurry and frighteningly indistinct. "If I were crazy, someone would tell me. Right?" She thought that was probably true. Toby would tell her. A friend. Her parents. People picked up on that kind of thing, didn't they?

And then, because it was quiet in her room and because she could still feel that tingling warmth against the back of her neck, Sarah let the six years that had passed since her time in the Underground push her up and away inside her head, imagining herself back in the place of that child she had been. _His_ hands on her waist, on her fingers, legs brushing hers as the music bound them.

"Goblin King," she said again, a whisper, and Sarah closed her eyes. The tingle was spreading, a warm indecent hum that vibrated down her arms and sent her breath into shivers. "_Jareth_," she allowed, a gift.

"Sarah," the voice came, a purr, a reminder, a disbelief. "Oh, but you are lovely." And, eyes closed, she let her hands move and imagined she felt _other_ hands against her waist, beneath her shirt, on her thighs. Lips on hers, a tongue against the cord in her throat as she bared it to the silence, her mind whipping into something light and loose and _beneath_.

When the spinning took her over, the hands bringing her somewhere she couldn't name, the hot thin mouth breaking her down as she listened to a voice that couldn't be real, Sarah opened her eyes on a cry. The word was the same, always the same, the memory nothing but the burning that hadn't quite left her body.

"Fuck," Sarah breathed, a harsh sort of half-sob. Another dream. Another horrid goblin dream.

She rolled onto her side, and was quiet.

* * *

In another place, within the castle beyond the Goblin City, the King let his head fall back against the cushioned back of his throne and closed his eyes. A groan slipped through his lips, the longing there a cruel mix with the satisfied exhaustion.

"Majesty?" A small one this time, barely a foot tall. Lumpy, like them all. Big eyes. He snapped his head up, gaze going molten.

"You interrupt my rest?"

"I… it just… it's nothing."

"Too right," he said sharply, making a note of the goblin's face as the creature hurried out. He'd look in the crystals later, find out if it really was nothing. For now, Jareth of the Underground leaned his head back once again and remembered the salty taste of Sarah's skin. The catlike twist of her body. The soft moan she made when he touched her _just there_.

"Until tomorrow, love," he whispered to the hollow air.


End file.
